Re: Default font: Transition from DejaVu to Noto
On 2023-09-14 11:16, Fabian Greffrath wrote:
Seriously, what I think should be installed on *every* system is a
complete set of serif/sans/mono latin fonts. And then additional
fonts should get pulled in by task-*-desktop packages based on the
user's selected language during D-I. This is how it was in
"fonts-dejavu-core" times.
This discussion tends to confirm that view as the consensus.
Instead, if you install fonts-noto-core on every system (at least as
it is now) you don't actually help the e.g. Devanagari people by
installing a Tamil font on their systems and vice versa (just to
pick some examples). But in the end, everybody ends up with
literally hundreds of fonts that they can read as much or less as the
"tofu" glyphs that they are meant to replace.
True. It's still what I personally would prefer.
Let me point at one not uncommon case: People who are able to read some
non-Latin language(s) often prefer English as the display language —
because the particular non-Latin language has poor translation coverage
or for some other reason — and hence install in English. Then the task-*
files don't help much.
Anyway, probably the conclusion from this discussion is that we should
move fonts-noto-core downwards in this list:
$ apt-cache depends fontconfig-config | grep fonts
|Depends: fonts-noto-core
|Depends: fonts-dejavu-core
|Depends: fonts-liberation
|Depends: fonts-croscore
|Depends: fonts-freefont-otf
|Depends: fonts-freefont-ttf
|Depends: fonts-urw-base35
Depends: fonts-texgyre
It's a bit ironic. I proposed in a MR to prepend fonts-noto-core to that
list, and you merged it. At the time I wasn't aware of the significance
of being listed first, and I suppose you weren't either.
As regards 60-latin.conf there is probably no reason to change it
further compared to upstream. If a user installs fonts-noto-core, Noto
will become default for sans-serif and serif, and it's reasonable to
assume that it is what they want in that case.
What do others think? Is that a reasonable conclusion from this discussion?
--
Gunnar
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